The Borneo Dispatches

Mark Synnott, Conrad Anker, Kevin Thaw, Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold and Renan Ozturk spent the better part of April, 2009, traveling through six ecozones on a big-wall free climbing expedition to Borneo's lush Kinabalu National Park. In this eighth video from the Boreno Dispatches the team summits Mount Kinabalu after several weeks of work  "commuting" up and down the wall.

According to Renan Ozturk getting to their new route required about 1,500 feet of fixed lines, down into a gully, just to start the wall. The line, still unnamed, shares some of the British and Spanish routes but also had a significant amount of new climbing. Renan says, "It would go fully free at roughly 5.13+ but the boys didn't quite have the time and weather the tag the summit and free the remaining few pitches that didn't go." As is, the team graded the route (VI 5.12 A2).

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This entire video series has been posted from the field, as it happened, with a satellite modem. Torrential rain made things a bit difficult at times and kept all the videos fairly small due to the small solar windows. Visit:Borneobigwall.blogspot.com for full details on the expedition.